Lin Dunn took over as head coach in 2008. She inherited a team built around a player in her prime and a defensive identity that had been waiting for a coach who would lean into it. Dunn leaned. By 2009 the Fever were in the WNBA Finals, where they lost to the Phoenix Mercury in five games. The Vault keeps the tape on that one too, but the year that matters is 2012.
Tamika Catchings was thirty-two. She had been MVP in 2011. She had been Defensive Player of the Year five times. She had four Olympic golds. She had played twelve seasons in Indiana and had never won a championship. The 2012 team was built to fix that.
Katie Douglas was the second scorer. Briann January and Tully Bevilaqua ran the perimeter defense. Erlana Larkins and Tammy Sutton-Brown rebounded. Dunn coached the way Lin Dunn coaches: two contests per shot, switch everything, run when you get the stop. The math was old. The execution was new.
The Finals were against the Minnesota Lynx — Maya Moore, Seimone Augustus, Lindsay Whalen, Rebekkah Brunson. The Lynx had won the title the year before. The Lynx were favored. The Fever beat them 3-1.
In Game 4, the clincher, Catchings scored 25 points. She was the Finals MVP. She cried at the trophy presentation. So did Dunn. So did several thousand people in Bankers Life Fieldhouse who had been waiting twelve years for this. So did people watching on television in Indianapolis and Knoxville and every other city that had loved Tamika Catchings for as long as she had been playing basketball.
The franchise has not won another title. It is possible the franchise will win another one. But there will only ever be one first. Number 24 hangs in the rafters. The Vault keeps the rest.
